


The Final Stitch

by Varynova



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Dissolution, Drabble, Gen, Sadstuck, ultimate self
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-11-23 13:15:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20892716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Varynova/pseuds/Varynova
Summary: At the end of all things, you stand with your wife, and you watch the multiverse crumble again.  She cannot, for she is but a vessel for a volume of light, even as she knew this eschatology was to come.You cradle her in your arms amidst the dimming of this white nothingness.The Ultimate Self is a disease, and you, Kanaya Maryam, are the only being in existence who would ever know it.





	The Final Stitch

Ten thousand years ago, perhaps more, your wife moved a hand to squeeze your quivering shoulder, and urged you back from the brink of tears. You had always presumed that you would be the source of luminance in your relationship, at least along literal lines, but as Rose's skin chipped away, revealing the pulse-ebbing yellow thrumming just underneath, you shielded your eyes even as they came unfocused, drove your gaze away in the cutting fullness of her glow. Your own, dim by mere comparison. You found it hard to even share a bed with her, for a while, due to the insistence of her inner light.

Unlike her gentle, reassuring touch, her eyes were hard-edged, harsh with luminescence. Black eyeliner outlined indefinite spheres, miniature suns.  
It took you a year to be able to gaze into them again without first wincing at what you'd lost.

More recently than that, maybe six years back, or maybe six thousand, she sat on the floor. She dug into the giving rug of your living room with her bare hands, licking cinders playing across it in trails behind her plying fingers, turning its once-coherent weave to ashen dust.

She speaks, haltingly, but with the startling alacrity and poise you know no others could manage.  
Kanaya, t-tell me. If they aren't here, where ARE they?  
KANAYA: Who  
KANAYA: Where Is Here Exactly  
If the others-- all of them-- aren't in the bounds of this story, within the confines of this specific lucubration, have they been destroyed, or did they never exist in the first place?  
KANAYA: What On Earth Is The Scope Of This Question  
KANAYA: What Others  
Not earth, no, certainly not. But then, are they safe? Did they escape it, or at least its searing gaze?  
KANAYA: Searing As In Dangerous To Our Friends  
KANAYA: Is This What You Speak Of Rose  
He... he once said, 'There exists inherent danger in a reader's eagerness to collapse that bubble, or to crack that tome. There is also danger in a creator's willingness to accommodate that desire. It's a risk for all involved. It should be.'  
KANAYA: Who Did  
KANAYA: Who Said That  
KANAYA: About What

Your voice is... even? No, that lie died millennia ago. Not so steady as disaffected, distant. You know your questions do not even reach her core, and your words cannot pierce her diatribe, anymore. Still, the questions are all you have, so you rattle them off, expecting no reply.  
'It turns out the gaze we cast from the sky of Earth C to revisit everyone isn't exactly friendly, like warm sunlight. It's more like a ravaging beam, destructive and unsettling to all that could have been safely imagined.'  
KANAYA: And That Would Be Our Safety So Ravaged  
KANAYA: Our Happiness Disrupted By  
KANAYA: What  
KANAYA: Some Immortal Being  
KANAYA: Some Eye Outside Our Own Domain  
Exactly. It's exactly that, don't you see? But we were NEVER happy, not in this version, nor any other. That exists outside the margins, off the page, not even in the soppiest dregs of melted marshmallow dripping from the bounds of this tale or that. If we were happy, we were unproblematized-- no, unchallenged, for all challenges are borne of disruption, turmoil. No matter how small, the tension is a burning ache to the brain, even my own.  
KANAYA: Rose Please  
KANAYA: No Matter What Your True Meaning It Scares Me Immensely Now  
KANAYA: Your Point Is Made Please  
But if we were unchallenged, we go forgotten. By his conception, anyway. We only grow with that struggle.  
KANAYA: But Then  
KANAYA: What Of Good Times  
KANAYA: What Of Nights Spent Knitting And Quiescent Cups Of Tea  
KANAYA: What Of  
The words catch in your throat, but you voice them anyway, because you must know. Even if she won't tell you, you will know.  
KANAYA: What Of The Good Sex Away From These Many Prying Eyes  
KANAYA: Rose  
But she looks at you-- not towards you, for once, but into you-- head cocked like a porcelain doll finished with its torments.  
Have you ever... Do you remember any of that, though? Did we ever?  
Her voice carries a bloodless surety.  
And where are they? We have no friends. No one else exists.  
KANAYA: I  
KANAYA: What  
KANAYA: Of Course I  
Then retell it to me. Remind me, elucidate me. Speak it to my ears, disrupt the grotesque ambushing us from the corner of my eyes, burn away this spell.

You reach for a memory, your distant, immortal past, but come up empty. It's as though the text of your memory has turned to dust and been ground into the carpet in which your sweet Rose digs.  
KANAYA: But  
KANAYA: It Must Have Happened  
KANAYA: It Is Who We Are  
KANAYA: It Shaped Us  
KANAYA: It Must Have  
Enough. Enough of this self-flagellation. I must go.  
You are tired. So very tired.  
KANAYA: Go  
KANAYA: Go Where  
Where you can't follow. Away, upwards. Somewhere... orthogonal to this space, away from the printed page. Twisting perhaps into a spiral-dimension dislike our own, but contained within us, informing us and being informed.  
KANAYA: And What Of Me  
KANAYA: What Becomes Of Me  
Whatever became of them.

The only thing that can fill your lungs, then, would be a snarling, pitchless shriek, the pained gasp of a woman falling out of relevance due to her wife's incomprehensible disease. But you resist this urge, managing to wipe away the first tears shed today at the hands of whatever sickness speaks through your wife's throat, with her voice, but words entirely of its own.  
You can only speak to it, now, not to her. Never again, to her.

KANAYA: Rose  
KANAYA: I Am Scared Truly  
KANAYA: I Am Terrified  
You're right to be. I was, once, in some other comfortable eternity, in a story you've already read.

You finally turn away, leave her to her task of dredging and torching. You have attempted this dialogue before, enough to know of the worthlessness of the strident claim that stories are to be told, not lived; you try to put it out of your mind far enough to distract yourself with some triviality, a project of sewing or memories of better times.

But her voice rings out again behind you, thin and distant.  
Even without what Dirk did to all of us, even away from him, or Jane, or Aranea, or the Condesce or Jack or anyone else whose hands have wrung the meaning from our cloth before...  
I always had to go. Each ending, the same, I had to go.

You can only surmise what mention of Dirk she makes. She's mumbled tales before, frantic weaves of some bitter space in which a grief-sick Strider consumed her body and contorted her mind, desperate to concoct meaning into his life and then ignite it like a meteorite and blaze himself out of consciousness forever.

But?  
It's too late. You simply cannot. Care.

KANAYA: Then Go Rose  
KANAYA: Best Of Luck  
And you, and you.  
KANAYA: I Love You

But there utters forth no reply.

**Author's Note:**

> Rose is quoting from [this letter](https://perfectlygeneric.fandom.com/wiki/Episode_52:_Semiotics,_Bridges,_and_Off-Ramps), from Andrew Hussie to Kate Mitchell of the [Perfectly Generic Podcast](https://perfectlygenericpodcast.com/).


End file.
